shared deliberate practice

Shared Deliberate Practice 213individual can engage in between meetings with the teacher. We call these practiceactivities deliberate practice and distinguish them from other activities, such as playfulinteraction, paid work, and observation of others, that individuals can pursue in thedomain (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer, 1993, p. 368).The question is whether the theory of deliberate practice rooted in a cognitivistframework of expertise sufficiently accounts for teambased learning? While Simon and Chase(1973) argued that expert skills acquisition in chess and soccer was fundamentally similar interms of pattern recognition, Ericsson and Smith (1991) in a literature review concluded thatexperts after thousands of hours of deliberate practice differ qualitatively in their informationprocessing. Team sports such as soccer and handball are dynamic and require coordinatedresponses between team players in relation to opponent players as the game unfolds. Teamplayers need the ability to integrate “the operations of the team in a timely way to form acomposition of operations that achieves satisfactory performance” (Ecceles and Tennenbaum,2004, 543).The aims of this article are twofold: (1) to identify and describe the relevant trainingsituations pertaining to high performance handball team training and (2) to examine how thehandball players’ development of expertise depends upon shared deliberate practice. Byshared deliberate practice we refer both to ways in which deliberate practice is sharedbetween team players and to the idea that deliberate practice should be conceived at teamlevel.Our argument is that the practice of handball and other team-sports is a matter of socialinteractions and coordinated actions between the players (Ronglan, 2009) and this type ofpractice can fruitfully be extended within the theoretical framework of expertise anddeliberate practice (Ericsson, 2007). The importance of shared deliberate practice as a form ofteambased learning is capturedby Therese Brisson, Olympic gold winner and six times WorldChampion in ice hockey:An important factor in the development of elite athletes is the training group [...] theless experienced athletes learn from the more skilled, and those who are pushing to getthe top challenge the more skilled athletes on a daily basis (Starkes and Ericsson, 2003, p.293).DELIBERATE PRACTICE AND TEAM TRAININGResearch on deliberate practice suggests that extended engagement within a certainpractice domain does not in itself necessarily lead to the acquisition of expertise (Ericsson,2007). The development of expertise requires that training activities are specifically designedto improve the performance of the athlete, and that the athlete deliberately concentrates onimproving particular aspects of his/her performance when engaged in training activities.As a prime example of deliberate practice, Ericsson uses aspiring experts such asviolinists’ solitary practice in which they work to master specific goals determined by theirmusic teachers at weekly lessons (Ericsson, 2006, p. 693) or chess players playing throughpublished games of the very best chess players in the world (Ericsson, 2006, p. 699). Jenkins(2010, p. 6) argues that the notion of deliberate practice involves the followingcharacteristics: solitary practice that is coach mediated, goal-directed, measurable, and highly